Sexism in Bible Translation: Part Two
The woman’s guide to reading the Bible and staying sane: Part Eleven
Like most people who read the Bible regularly, I don’t spend a great deal of time worrying about what translation I’ve got in my hand and whether a different translation would say something else. Occasionally I want to see if the verses I’m reading are rendered differently by different translators, but most of the time I just read, trusting that the translators have done a reasonable job of rendering in words that I understand texts I couldn’t read if they were still ancient Greek and Hebrew. My choice of translation is influenced mainly by how much I enjoy reading it.
But, as we saw in the example of Junia in the last article in this series, translators are human and cultural bias and theological standpoint inevitably has an impact on the way they approach the text. That’s not necessarily deliberate. It’s just that when someone is approaching the text with a particular world view, they will tend to see things through that lens and that will inevitably influence translating decisions. Translators have been male, living in a sexist, androcentric society. That has inevitably, on some occasions, influenced translating decisions. Recent changes in society that have alerted people the sexism inherent in translation have led some to want to redress the balance. And that, perhaps predictably, has led to quite a lot of heated debate.
Pronouns
When, in 2005 and 2011, the translators of the NIV brought out updated versions where much of the masculine language was replaced with gender neutral language, outrage ensued. At least in some quarters. I, for one, thought it was quite a good idea. But there were some who loudly declared that it was ruinous and irresponsible and giving in to the dreadful feminists.
As it turns out, our English Bibles have often translated Greek and Hebrew words that are gender neutral into masculine words like men and man and son and brother. Language is always changing. It used to be common practice in English to use masculine terms to refer humankind in general, which is why gender neutral terms got masculinised when they were translated into English. In modern English, this practice has largely died out. Whereas 50 years ago it was common practice to say ‘men’ or ‘he’ if you were talking about people in general, that language now sounds very dated.
So the new translations were, in large part, rendering the bible more accurately rather than less accurately. In about a thousand places in the New Testament, the NIV’s new, neutral language, brings the translation closer to the original Greek. So when Jesus told his first disciples that he was going to make them ‘fishers of men’, the Greek is more accurately translated as ‘people’ rather than ‘men’. When the NIV opted for, ‘I will send you out to fish for people’ some people didn’t take kindly to it. We all know that ‘men’ means everyone, they said, and the older translation sounds so much better, so why meddle?
More controversially, the NIV translation committee, in particular in its 2005 version, went further and in some places made the decision to render some masculine pronouns as neutral where it makes sense to say that the authors did really mean ‘everyone’ but because of the patriarchal context they were writing from, they had a tendency to say ‘he’ when really they were referring to ‘people in general’.
So, for example, to take a very familiar saying of Jesus, [in Luke 9:23] the older, Revised Standard Version has:
“If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”
The English Standard Version which is careful to keep the gender of all the original pronouns the same as the Greek has:
“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”
and the New International Version, wanting to be as inclusive as possible and taking its cue from the fact that the word ‘anyone’ indicates that Jesus seems to be speaking to everyone, has:
“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.”
It’s entirely reasonable to argue that the NIV takes the more accurate approach if you think that the original authors frequently used male pronouns to refer to ‘people in general’ and when you take into account that the English language has shifted, so that we now tend to use more neutral pronouns to mean ‘people in general’. If you use ‘men’ readers could think it means ‘just men’ when it actually means ‘people in general’.
But remember, the biblical authors existed in a patriarchal culture that heavily influenced the way they saw the world and the way they wrote about it. Much of the time, they simply didn’t see the women around them. So when they used ‘he’ to refer to ‘people in general’, the reality was that from their perspective ‘people in general’ generally meant ‘men’. So should we maintain the author’s bias in translation or not?
It’s exactly the same kind of cultural influences that led so many English translators to use even more male pronouns than were in the original manuscripts. They might say that ‘mankind’ actually means ‘the human race’ but from their perspective, ‘the human race’ is, by default, male. In fact, the convention of using masculine terms to refer to people in general does also exist in New Testament Greek, probably for the same cultural reasons that it does in English. Which strengthens the argument that there are times when it’s reasonable to translate a Greek ‘he’ into a more neutral ‘they’. However, like it or not, if you translate the Bible in a more gender neutral way than is suggested by the manuscripts, you’re not only making it more readable, and arguably more accurate, for a modern audience, you are also going some way to correct the patriarchal bias of the original authors.
So the approach taken by the NIV makes perfect sense to someone who is doing their best to make the Bible relevant and inclusive. But if you put yourself in the shoes of an inerrantist, who believes that God chose every single word of the original manuscript, you can see how this would really annoy you.
Bible translation is not particularly easy. It involves art and judgement as much as science. Ancient manuscripts vary slightly from each other. Languages are structured differently to each other. Lots of words don’t have exact equivalents. Translations that are more precise are often less readable. It’s all a bit of a minefield. And that’s before you throw into the mix the culture and perspectives and preconceptions of the people doing the translation.
Take ESV, quoted above. Their translation committee takes an inerrantist perspective. They are very clear that, when it comes to pronouns, they need to stick to the ones indicated by the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. None of this adapting things for a modern audience. They want to stick as closely as possible to what was originally written. They want to produce want they would call a ‘faithful’ translation. But they are not neutral. Wayne Grudem, who is part of the translation committee and wrote the ESV Study Bible, is also one of the founders of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which is strongly of the view that in churches and families, Biblical Men need to be in charge of Biblical Women.
There have been a few updates to the ESV since it was first published and in several places the changes that have been made have moved it towards being less gender neutral rather than more gender neutral. Perhaps most controversially, in their most recent translation, Genesis 3:16 was changed from “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” to “Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.” I’m not sure that there’s that much difference between those two translations, but what I do think is really interesting is how explicitly their particular theological understanding has influenced their choice of words. They say that their reasoning for this is that it more explicitly reflects God’s plan for the different roles of men and women in creation. In other words, they think it makes it more obvious that men are meant to be in charge of women. In recent years, they have perceived the traditional roles of men and women to be under threat and their reaction to this has been to hold to their position ever more strongly. Hence the change to the Genesis passage.
Most of the time, I would support the use of gender neutral language to make the text more inclusive. Sometimes, though, I wonder if it obscures the gender bias in the original, in a way that is unhelpful and unfaithful to the text. Take the first few chapters of Proverbs — advice from a father to his son. These are chapters addressed to an audience of young men, whose youthful abundance of testosterone and bad judgement could lead them into difficulties. Some translations change the address ‘my son’ to ‘my child’. This advice is about not getting fights, avoiding violence and prostitutes and being vigilant about other men’s adulterous wives who might lead you astray. Changing from ‘son’ to ‘child’ really doesn’t make it less male centric.
Male bias in The Message
I really enjoy The Message. Eugene Peterson’s lively paraphrase of the Bible has often brought me joy. So I was a bit disappointed to discover that it, too, suffers from male bias. Remember the verses we met in Isaiah, where God speaks with the voice of a mother, using images of pregnancy?
“Listen to me, descendants of Jacob,
all you who remain in Israel.
I have cared for you since you were born.
Yes, I carried you before you were born.
I will be your God throughout your lifetime — until your hair is white with age.
I made you and I will care for you. (from Isaiah 46)
Listen to what Eugene Peterson does with these verses in The Message:
“Listen to me, family of Jacob, everyone that’s left of the family of Israel. I’ve been carrying you on my back from the day you were born. And I’ll keep on carrying you when you’re old. I’ll be there, bearing you when you’re old and grey. I’ve done it and will keep on doing it, carrying you on my back, saving you…”
So how does the mother carrying a child in her belly become a dad with his child on his back? The Message is a paraphrase, rather than a translation. Peterson does a brilliant job of bringing the the text to life with beautiful imagery. But here that imagery takes God from being maternal to paternal. One can only speculate as to why. I wonder if Peterson was just so used to thinking of God as male that he simply missed the feminine imagery in this passage.
Helpers or Leaders?
Greek words that are used to describe men in the New Testament as leaders have often been rendered ‘helper’ when referring to women. So when Paul calls himself a ‘diakonos’ in (Colossians 1:23 and 25) the NKJV translates this as ‘minister’. But low and behold. When Phoebe is described as a ‘diakonos’ in Romans 16:1, the NKJV renders this as ‘servant’. When, in Romans 16:2 Phoebe is a ‘prostatis’ the NKJV calls her a ‘helper’ but when the same word turns up in Romans 12:8 it’s translated ‘leading’.
This is, to say the least, a bit inconsistent. As we’ve already seen, Phoebe seems to be have been quite a significant figure in the early church. It is Phoebe who takes Paul’s letter to the Romans. She would very probably have not only delivered the letter, but also been there to read it, to explain it and to answer questions about it. Not just the delivery person but also a teacher. So it’s interesting that translators have tended to assign her the role of ‘helper’ or ‘servant’. Could this, possibly, be something to do with the fact that she’s a woman?
In actuality, ‘servant’ is probably a better translation of ‘diakonos’. The early church went to considerable lengths to avoid calling people ‘leaders’. Preferring words (like diakonos) that emphasised their servant roles and avoided hierarchy. But by the time people were translating the Bible into English, the idea of the church as a hierarchical structure was well established and women were generally excluded from that hierarchy. And the gender bias in translation is very useful if you want to maintain the view that women shouldn’t get to be leaders.
The New Living Translation
In one of his letters to his protege, Timothy, Paul included a famous list of qualifications for anyone who wanted to be the overseer of a church. Churches met in people’s homes, so this needed to be someone who could manage their household well and who enjoyed hosting people. There were other sensible qualifications, like being able to teach and being generally of good character. Paul also mentions that they should be ‘the husband of but one wife’. So could a woman be a church overseer? These verses begin with a neutral pronoun (anyone) and mainly list qualifications that could easily be met by both men and women. Most householders would have been men, but not all of them. It’s the thing about being a ‘husband of only one wife’ that makes it controversial. Do you take Paul’s meaning very literally and say that you can’t be a husband unless you’re a man? If you are taking it literally, is he also disqualifying widowers and single men? Should we sack church leaders if their spouses die? Or do you bear in mind the fact that we know there were women leading churches in their homes in New Testament times? The New Living Translation has a simple way of sorting out the problem. It just adds the phrase, “ So a church leader must be a man…” Problem solved.
The NLT has a reputation for being gender inclusive, because it frequently says ‘brothers and sisters’ where older translations might just say ‘brothers’. But this is not the only little patriarchal grenade thrown in by the translators. There are more. We’ll look at just one example. Take this from one of Peter’s letters (1 Peter 3:5–6). In the NIV we get:
For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to adorn themselves. They submitted themselves to their own husbands, like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her lord. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear.
To put this in context, this verse comes in a section of advice from Peter about how to live wisely in a situation where they are living like foreigners and exiles amongst pagans who don’t understand them and are likely to accuse them of doing wrong. So Peter’s advice is to live in a way that will make it difficult for people to find fault. They should live as free people, he says, but they should also live in a way that shows respect for the human authority around them, such as governors and emperors and such like. And so he is talking to wives, in that societal context, about the sort of life that will give them a good reputation and perhaps, if their husbands are not believers, will so impress them that they will want to follow Jesus too. And then he gives advice to husbands.
The word for ‘submission’ in this verse (hupotasso), although it means to ‘arrange under’ when used in military contexts, outside of that, it can just mean ‘cooperate with’. Our English word ‘submit’ has a much stronger sense of subordination about it than is necessarily implied by the original Greek. And the word ‘kurios’ which is translated here as ‘lord’ is a general term of deference, sort of like ‘sir’ when it’s used by polite waiters in fancy restaurants. So translators of this verse have a definite choice about how to pitch it. The Message goes for:
Cultivate inner beauty, the gentle, gracious kind that God delights in. The holy women of old were beautiful before God that way, and were good, loyal wives to their husbands. Sarah, for instance, taking care of Abraham, would address him as “my dear husband.” You’ll be true daughters of Sarah if you do the same, unanxious and unintimidated.
But the NLT gives us:
This is how the holy women of old made themselves beautiful. They trusted God and accepted the authority of their husbands. For instance, Sarah obeyed her husband, Abraham, and called him her master. You are her daughters when you do what is right without fear of what your husbands might do.
Those are some interesting translation choices. The first thing to notice is that suddenly the woman becomes passive. Throughout the New Testament, submission, however you read that word, is something that you offer. No one is ever given the right to demand it or force it. You submit yourself. You offer your cooperation. It’s an active thing. It’s a gift that you give and in doing so, you retain your agency, your autonomy and your freedom. But the NLT changes the sense of this entirely by translating ‘submitted’ or ‘cooperated’ as ‘accepted the authority of’.
This phrase turns the woman into the passive accepter of authority. It robs her of agency and gives it to the husband. In this translation, any ambiguity there might be about the husband’s authority is entirely lost. He has authority. She accepts that authority. She’s no longer the subject, the giver. She’s the object, the receiver. She’s passive.
It gets worse. The choice to translate ‘kurios’ as ‘master’ casts the husband very firmly in the role of one who gives orders and the wife in the role of one who obeys them. And the sting in the tail is that the NLT does something that no other translation I’ve found does. It changes ‘doing good without fear’ to ‘not being afraid of what your husband might do’. You could assume that the doing good in this verse is connected to the way the wife is being advised to behave toward her husband, but that’s not the only way to read it. It’s not even the most obvious way to read it. It could be about fearlessly doing good in general. That makes sense too. The NLT removes any ambiguity by adding the phrase ‘of what your husbands might do’. In the light of the way the rest of these verses have been rendered in the NLT, the plainest reading of this last sentence is that the right thing for a woman to do is to accept the authority of her husband without being afraid of what he might do with that authority. And you don’t have a reason to resist fear unless you’re afraid someone might do something harmful or stupid.
Put that all together, and the NLT translation of this verse is potentially harmful. Imagine a devout woman in an unhealthy relationship, with a domineering or narcissistic man, reading this verse and taking it seriously. That’s frightening.
If your chosen Bible translation takes a sexist stance, you’re probably not going to know. About twenty years ago, the New Living Translation was particularly popular amongst my friends friends and contemporaries. It is wonderfully easy to read. It uses up to date English and has a lovely flow and dynamism. I now know that it also takes a particular theological and cultural line on the position of women which makes some of its translating decisions somewhat sexist. I had no idea that was the case when I was recommending it as a translation of choice to my friends twenty years ago.
What is clear, is that the most influential scholars, over the centuries, have viewed the Bible through the male-centric, patriarchal lenses of their cultures and that has had an impact on the way we have read and interpreted the Bible. And the way it’s been translated.
I wouldn’t want to overstate the influence of translation. The text itself is already coming from the perspective of a patriarchal society. Even the most gender aware translation is not going to prevent it from being male-centric and sexist because the authors wrote from the perspective of the societies in which they lived. But it’s helpful to be aware, I think, of the fact that translation is not a gender bias free occupation.
Next article in this series:
To start this series at the beginning:
Three suggestions for how not to read the Bible
The woman’s guide to reading the Bible and staying sane: Part One
You might also be interested in this series, taking an honest look at the sexism in the Bible:
The (Violent Misogynistic) Elephant in The Room
Facing the misogyny of the Bible honestly: Part One
Or this series, rediscovering some of the incredible feminine imagery for God that we find in the Bible.
“Un-Bloking” God…
Rediscovering God’s Feminine side: Part One
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